What this is, and who it is for
This is a floor. Seven things, and if any one of them is missing, a particular stranger on a particular day gives up and goes somewhere else.
It is written for the person who runs the business and also happens to be the person who edits the website, usually late, usually resentfully. You do not need a budget for any of this. Six of the seven are sentences. The seventh is a date.
The list is not derived from what good websites tend to have. It is derived from the other direction: what people repeatedly cannot do on small business sites, and what they were trying to do when they stopped. Most of the sites that fail our entry bar fail on one of these seven, and they fail on it in a way the owner would fix in ten minutes if anyone had told them.
One thing to be clear about before you read on. Clearing this floor does not mean we would list you. The floor is about being legible to a stranger. Inclusion is a separate and stricter question, and plenty of sites clear the floor and are still refused, mostly for reasons that have nothing to do with the site at all.
Why a floor and not a best-practice list
Best-practice lists are additive. They tell you what excellent looks like and leave you to work out which parts matter, which is a research project you do not have time for. Then they age badly, because most of what they contain is fashion.
A floor works the other way. It asks a single question of every candidate item: if this is missing, what can a visitor no longer do? If the honest answer is "carry on slightly less impressed", the item is not on the floor. If the answer is "decide whether to contact you", it is.
That test does a lot of work. It removes almost everything people worry about and it keeps a small number of things people never think about at all. It also means each item comes with its own justification built in, so you can argue with the list on its own terms. If you think item four does not apply to you, the question is not whether you like item four. It is whether a stranger can proceed without it in your particular case. Sometimes they can. Item five is the clearest example.
The ten-second stranger test is the companion to this: it looks at your site as an arriving visitor rather than as a checklist. The two overlap on purpose. This one is the inventory, that one is the experience.
1. A sentence saying what you sell
Somewhere near the top, in words a person outside your trade would use, say what someone gets if they give you money.
What breaks without it. The visitor cannot tell whether they are in the right place. Everything else on the page becomes unreadable, because they have no frame to read it against. Your prices mean nothing, your gallery means nothing, your careful about page means nothing, because none of it answers the first question.
This sounds too obvious to be a real failure. It is by some distance the most common one we see. It happens because the sentence you would write for a stranger and the sentence you would write for yourself are different sentences, and after a few years you can only write the second one. You start describing an approach, a philosophy, a set of values, a way of working. All of that may be true and none of it tells a visitor what they can buy.
The repair is mechanical. Write down what a customer would say to a friend when recommending you. That sentence goes at the top. It will feel embarrassingly plain to you. That is the correct feeling.
If you sell several unrelated things, name them as a short list rather than trying to write one sentence that covers all of them. A list of three concrete things beats an abstraction that covers everything.
2. A way to reach a human
One method of contact that reaches a person and that you actually watch.
What breaks without it. The visitor has decided to proceed and cannot. This is the most expensive failure on the list, because it happens to the people furthest down the path.
Note the two conditions. Reaches a person, and you actually watch it. Five contact methods where nobody answers any of them is worse than one that works, because the visitor has now tried you twice and been ignored twice. If an inbox is dead, remove it from the page. Removing a channel is not a retreat.
A contact form is a legitimate choice. It costs you something in trust, because the visitor cannot see where their message goes and has no record of having sent it, and that cost is worth paying in some situations. Contact pages that work covers the trade-off properly, along with the things that should never appear on that page under any circumstances.
3. Some indication of price
Not a price list. An indication.
What breaks without it. The visitor cannot decide whether to start a conversation, so a large share of them do not start one. Silence about price is not neutral. It reads as either "expensive" or "they will quote based on what they think I can pay", and both of those readings cost you enquiries you never hear about.
Every objection to this is legitimate. Your work genuinely varies. Your competitors can read your site. A number attracts the wrong enquiries. All true, and none of it means the only alternative is silence.
There is a lot of room between a full price list and nothing at all. A starting-from figure. A typical range with two worked examples. The unit without the total. The floor, meaning the smallest job you will take. Or a properly done explanation of what the price depends on, which is different from writing "prices on application" and hoping. Pricing pages for the terrified works through all five, and any of them satisfies this item.
4. Whether you are open, or taking work
The visitor needs to know whether you can help them now.
What breaks without it. For a physical business, someone travels to a locked door. For a service business, someone writes a careful enquiry to a person who stopped taking clients eight months ago. In both cases the visitor has spent something real and got nothing, and the feeling that produces is not neutral.
For a shop this means opening hours, and published hours are a promise with an ongoing maintenance cost attached. Wrong hours damage you more than absent hours, because absent hours make someone ring first and wrong hours make them drive over. Opening hours are a promise covers how to make a smaller promise you can actually keep, which is nearly always the right move.
For a service business this means availability. One line. "Taking new projects from March." "Books are closed until further notice." "Currently at capacity, but ask anyway if the work is small." That last one is unglamorous and it is the truth for a lot of people, and stating it is far better than leaving a visitor to guess.
5. Where you are, or that it doesn't matter
Location, or an explicit signal that location is irrelevant.
What breaks without it. The visitor cannot tell whether you can serve them. Someone who needs a physical visit does not know if you are near enough. Someone buying something entirely remote wastes time working out whether distance is a problem when it never was.
The second half of this item matters as much as the first. If you work with people anywhere, say so. A single line saying you work remotely with clients wherever they are removes a doubt that otherwise sits there silently.
If you have a public premises, the address is straightforward. If you work from home, it is not, and the answer is not your home address. We would not publish a residential address about you, and we suggest you do not publish one about yourself, including in the case where your home is the registered address of the business. A town, a region, or a service radius does the job for a visitor. The legal side of this is genuinely complicated and it is not something we will guess at; see item six.
6. Who you are, in whatever detail applies to you
Some statement of the entity behind the site.
What breaks without it. The visitor cannot work out who they would be dealing with, which is the question that sits underneath every other question when money is involved. Anonymity is normal for a large company and unsettling for a small one, because the whole appeal of a small supplier is that there is a person there.
For most people this is small. A name, a trading name, or a short line about who does the work. It does not need to be a biography and it does not need a photograph.
Where it gets complicated is the legal question: what a business is required to display about itself on a website. The honest answer is that it depends on your legal form, your sector and your jurisdiction, and that one country's rules are repeated online constantly as if they applied everywhere. We are not going to tell you what applies to you, because we do not know and asserting it would be worse than useless. What your site has to say about who you are points at named primary sources per jurisdiction and states plainly where our research stopped. Read that one rather than treating this paragraph as an answer.
7. A date somewhere that proves the site is tended
Any date, anywhere, that shows a human has been here recently.
What breaks without it. The visitor cannot tell whether the business still exists. This is the item nobody thinks about, and it silently poisons everything above it. A site with no date has no way to distinguish itself from a site that was abandoned in 2019, and abandoned sites look exactly like this one.
A visitor makes this judgement from whatever evidence is available. A copyright year that stopped several years ago. A "latest news" section whose latest news is old. An events page listing things that already happened. Each of those is a date, and each is currently telling people you are gone.
The cheapest fix is a single line saying when the page was last reviewed, and then actually reviewing it. That is a stronger signal than a blog nobody updates, because it is a claim about maintenance rather than about output. It also means you own the signal instead of leaving visitors to infer one from a stale footer.
There is a warning attached. A last-reviewed date you do not maintain is worse than no date, in exactly the way wrong opening hours are worse than absent ones. Do not put one up unless you will touch it. This is the same discipline we hold ourselves to on every record we publish, and it is not free for us either.
What is deliberately not on this list
Five things people expect to see here, and why each is absent.
A logo. No visitor has ever failed to buy something because a business had no logo. It is a want, not a floor item.
A blog. Publishing regularly is a lot of work, and its absence does not stop anyone proceeding. If your reason for wanting one is to signal that the site is alive, item seven does that for the cost of one line.
Social feeds embedded on the page. An embedded feed does not answer any of the seven questions and imports a dependency you do not control. If the feed dies, your homepage now displays something broken, which actively works against item seven.
Testimonials. A visitor can rarely verify them and largely discounts them. They may help once someone has already decided you are plausible. They do not get anyone to that point, and no visitor was blocked by their absence.
A redesign. This is the big one. A redesign is the most common response to "my website is not working" and almost never the correct one. A site can be genuinely well-designed and fail five of these seven, which is why one of the nine failures behind most refusals is specifically a beautiful site that says nothing. Fix the sentences first. If the sentences are right and the site still fails, then talk about design.
We are also not recommending a platform, a builder or a tool, here or anywhere. Every recommendation of that kind ages badly and puts us in a position where a company could reasonably offer us money to be named. All seven items work on any platform, including a single hand-written page.
If you can only do three
Some people reading this will not do seven things. Fair enough. Do these three, in this order.
One: the sentence saying what you sell. Nothing else on your site can be read correctly without it. If you do exactly one thing today, do this.
Two: the working contact method. One channel that reaches a person and that you watch. Delete the dead ones while you are there. Deleting takes two minutes and immediately improves the page.
Three: the date. A last-reviewed line, or a corrected copyright year, or the removal of the news section whose most recent item is old. Any of the three costs almost nothing and stops your site announcing that you have closed.
Those three answer "are you the right place", "can I reach you" and "do you still exist". A stranger who has those three answers can proceed. They may still want to know price, availability, location and who you are, and each of those will lose you some people, but they can proceed.
Then come back for items three and four when you have an hour, because price and availability are where most of the remaining loss happens.
In Plain English
A stranger arrives on your site with four questions and about ten seconds. Are you the right kind of business, can I afford you, can you help me now, and can I reach you. Two more questions sit underneath: where are you, and who am I dealing with. And one silent question runs behind all of them, which is whether you still exist at all.
Seven short pieces of text answer all of that. Not a redesign, not a logo, not a content strategy. Seven sentences, one of which is a date.
If your website is not working, the odds are strongly against the cause being how it looks. Check the seven first. It costs you an evening, and the evening is nearly always enough.
Clearing all seven still does not mean we would list you, and we would rather say that plainly than let a checklist read like an application form. The floor exists because it helps you, and it would help you if this site did not exist.
Get the shopfront checklist at free templates, or read what these words actually mean if you are not sure whether what you have is a shopfront at all. The rest of this section is at shopfront basics, the wider craft is at being findable, and the patterns behind our refusals are at the refusal file. If you want the buyer's side of the same problem, what a stranger checks before buying is the mirror image of this post.